1. Field
The present disclosure generally relates to a chip package. More specifically, the present disclosure relates to a chip package that includes a voltage regulator module (VRM) that is electrically coupled to a proximate processor by an interposer chip that includes through-substrate vias (TSVs).
2. Related Art
Semiconductor process technology continues to scale to smaller critical dimensions and commensurately higher integrated-circuit densities. These trends are enabled by continuous advancements in front-end-of-line processing technologies and in chip-packaging technologies that leverage advances in the back-end-of-line technologies. In addition, technological progress is being sustained by advances in chip multi-threading and multi-core processor designs.
Given these trends, current semiconductor-industry roadmaps indicate that within a decade: the clock speed of the processor will approach 10 GHz; static currents in the processor core will increase to 250 A; the dynamic-current slew rate will increase to 250 A/ns; and the processor-core voltage will decrease to 0.7 V. This predicted rapid advancement in semiconductor process technology in conjunction with unbalanced loading of processors (which is associated with switching between multiple processor cores) is expected to pose very difficult challenges in processor power management, such as efficient power delivery and accurate voltage regulation.
In particular, processor performance is expected to be increasingly limited by transient power demands. For example, power-supply noise (which is sometimes referred to as ‘voltage-droop noise’ or ‘voltage droop’) is proportional to the maximum rate of change in current,
            ⅆ      i              ⅆ      t        .Because the incremental current di increases and the time scale dt decreases with each new generation of processors, the power-supply noise is expected to increase significantly. Consequently, it will be increasingly difficult for associated voltage regulators to meet this challenge.
Hence, what is needed is a chip package that does not suffer from the above-described problems.